She feels a growing disconnect with her wife and enrolls them both in marriage counseling, where their sessions end after Leah is unable to show up from spending even more time in the bathtub.

As the days pass, Leah's symptoms grow worse: she has begun vomiting up saltwater, layers of her skin peel off in the bathtub, and she is losing sensations in her body.

Miri turns to online forums to find people she relates to, eventually reading a post that states the hardest part of grief is not the loss, but needing to accept the aftermath that one's partner is gone.

Leah finds her memories of Miri slowly slipping away and is disappointed by the lack of research she can do, while Jelka becomes obsessed with voices that only she can hear and eventually commits suicide by escaping through a hatch.

"[5] In an interview with Sam Manzella of Them, Armfield said that the novel was in part inspired by a wish to explore the "crossover with queer women’s fiction and the sea," adding that the ocean is often used to symbolise both "something forbidden" and something that "can be many things at once.

"[8] Alycia Pirmohamed of The Big Issue reviewed the novel similarly, saying that the novel was "exquisitely grotesque, surreal, and elegiac in equal measure," adding that it excelled in the "space of creeping horror, of suspense, of bodily peculiarity.